Stronger Ties: CETA Tariff Elimination and the Impact on Canadian Exports

The Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is on track to come into effect in 2016. The deal is Canada’s most significant bilateral trade agreement since the Canada-U.S. free trade deal in the late 1980s. CETA is larger in scale than any other agreement in Canada’s history and addresses a wide range of issues. Provisions have been made for improved protection of investments, recognition of credentials, and other measures to facilitate mobility of labour and better opportunities in government procurement.

This briefing aims to assess the impact that tariff elimination could have on Canada’s goods exports. Using standard theoretical and econometric techniques, our empirical analysis shows that tariff elimination on goods, in real terms, will result in over $1.4 billion being added to Canada’s merchandise exports to the EU by 2022.

The briefing is part of Signal49 Research’s Global Commerce Centre series on preparing for free trade with the European Union.